XGen Geometry Instancer

XGen is a geometry instancer that lets you populate the surface of polygon meshes with an arbitrary number of primitives either randomly or uniformly placed. XGen lets you procedurally create and style hair, fur and feathers for characters. For set dressing, XGen lets you quickly populate large-scale environments, including grass savannas, forests, rocky landscapes, and debris trails.

With XGen you can:

Create hair, fur and instanced geometry from XGen presets. See Create hair or fur using an XGen preset.
Use brush-based grooming tools to style hair and fur. See Create hair and fur with gooming brushes.
Create hair and fur and more by instancing spline primitives. See Create hair or fur with spline primitives.
Instance simple primitive geometry types including splines, spheres, card, and polygon objects. See Instance primitive and archive geometry.
Populate scenes with archived geometry, such as trees, flowers, and grasses, or other polygon objects from your Maya scenes. See Create custom archives from selected objects.

XGen is a plug-in that automatically loads when you start Maya. If the XGen plug-in does not appear in the main menu bar, load the xgenToolkit.mll plugin, which provides XGen functionality, and the xgenMR.py plugin, which enables the mental ray rendering of XGen primitives.

For information about using the Plugin Managerto load plugins, see Load or unload Maya plug-ins.

Note: If you create a file reference from a scene that includes an XGen instanced geometry, you must turn on Use namespaces in the Reference Options. See Reference Options.